Carousel Feeding in the Asteroid Midden // Livelock

For Egrol, the protagonist of Spencer Nitkey’s Thanatosis, a mind-expanding encounter with workers who have agency

Everyone on Kupiter said ORCA pilots were the only workers left who still made decisions.

The black ships shimmered in the port bay. The Orbital Response and Coordinated Attack pod rose from the bay into space – six ships, six orca brains in suspension fluid, six pilots, and Egrol wide-eyed next to Shreea as she initiated the pilot pairing protocol with her whale. She treated Egrol like an overeager intern, sloughing most of his questions off with a grunt or a “you’ll see,” while the system booted up. He resented that she thought herself better than him. What he really resented was that she was right. Envy leaked from him like a punctured oil line. He hoped Shreea didn’t notice, but if it was true, if there was somewhere on Kupiter where work wasn’t pure emergence, he would lock himself in the hangar bay and never leave until someone let him become a pilot.

“You ready?” Shreea’s voice was calm and confident. Egrol rocked in the passenger seat, wondering, as always, how he’d ended up precisely here.

He’d spent the last four years performing directed labor for Kupiter. He blinked at prompts, flexed tendons when instructed, let systems smarter than him route his body through tasks whose purposes were totally illegible to him. These ORCA pilots were supposed to be different. That’s why he’d hacked the ride-along lottery.

When he won, he expected something between propaganda and a recruitment drive, but this was no training exercise. There was a real, livelocked swarm of demobots out there, threatening to tear through everything in the sector if it wasn’t stopped, and Shreea and her pod were going hunting.

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mill_swarm784 spasmed among the silt of its recent destruction. An abandoned mining outrig’s ruins floated in the ether, tiny splinters of silver darting through the detritus. Thousands of demolition bots swarmed in spits and passions. They were a cloud, consuming and destroying everything in their messy orbit.

Shreea finished the pairing protocols by sliding a helmet over her head. Suddenly, the muscles of her body tensed, veins popping as her eyes rolled back in their sockets and her fists clenched tightly. Even the whites of her eyes glowed as her and the orca’s minds collapsed into each other. She came back to consciousness with a predatory flint-spark in her pupils and a cackling grin. She was a roided-up jock, constantly moving with the confidence of an athlete running out of the tunnel into a stadium of cheering fans. All the pilots were like that. They were all convinced they were humanity’s greatest gifts to Kupiter. Egrol thought that maybe she was right.

“Let’s feast!” It was a new voice, not entirely Shreea’s own. She turned to Egrol with a face steeled and energized. “You’ve never seen work like this,” she bragged. “Out there,” she pointed toward the approaching swarm, “we make the decisions.” Egrol swallowed hard.

The pod hovered at the periphery of the storm.

“Watch,” said Shreea.

An automated garbage collector ship came through, sweeping up the detritus left in the swarm’s wake. Shreea told Egrol it was the sixth cleanup attempt since the bots went out of control. As it drew near, its circular mouth dilated open, wider and wider the closer it came: expectant, like a whale readying for krill.

The swarm didn’t disperse as it should. The collector’s intrusion sent them frenzying. The moment the vessel reached the edge of the debris, mill_swarm784 tore into it. Dart after dart ripped through the ship like bullets. In the cold vacuum between asteroid stations, the ship dissolved in their greedy, glitching jaws.

Shreea smiled and turned to Egrol. “Most of you are living just like that ship: autopilot and indifference. A livelock swarm milling like this” – she gestured with her head at the swarm spinning around itself – “would tear through everything in Kupiter eventually if it weren’t for us.”

He didn’t argue, especially about her assessment of him. He was living on autopilot. It was hard for Egrol to imagine anything in the Asteroid Midden – that almost empty pocket of abandoned mining facilities and old broken shipyards – mattering to the rest of Kupiter, but he knew better than to try and understand how everything here in the outskirts connected.

Shreea leaned forward. The ship moved with her body. She swung her hips in the suspension harness and the ORCA vessel moved in response, its flight path arcing. The whale pod spread out wide, surrounding the swarm.

“Lucky for you, we’re built different.”

It was true. The whole athletic squad of pilots looked like ancient Olympians. They moved through life like no one else Egrol had met on Kupiter. Even outside the vessels, Shreea and her pod walked like they knew where they were going. Like they were in charge of their lives.

Out here, they were. The envy he felt turned to awe as the ships swam through space, their vessels totally responsive to Shreea and the other pilots’ embodied motions. He tried to focus on the awe and forget the envy – emotional states had a habit of propagating through Kupiter’s systems.

The other ORCA vessels hovered at the edge of the swarm, waiting. Egrol’s skin goosebumped with anticipation.

“All glory to the killer whales, right?” Shreea said with a wink. Then she screeched. An inhuman howl exploded from her as she leaned forward. The ORCAs dove toward the swarm, tightening around it, and the feeding commenced.

Egrol had trouble choosing whether to watch Shreea or the swarm in his viewport. In her harness, each movement of her body rocked the ship. She spun, and the ship pirouetted in the black. She lunged, and the ship shot forward. It was all so legible to human eyes – so causal. Every decision she made immediately shaped the vessel’s behavior.

For the pod, Shreea played the matriarch. Her ORCA vessel stayed back as the other five propulsed toward the swarm. Thirteen thousand demobots – “the largest I’ve seen!” Shreea said – swam through the debris field before them, twisting in a chaotic murmuration. “Let’s ride the carousel!” Shreea cheered.

Shreea’s language descended into a series of sonorous clicks and resonant moans answered by the sister ships as they moved. Her face, though, lingered for a moment before following. Egrol watched her carefully look over the pod from her monitor, counting each one on her fingers. He remembered the long hugs she gave each of them before boarding the ship. She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply, holding it.

“Be safe,” she whispered, after the clicks and moans receded. She didn’t say it over the comms. No one but Egrol heard her. It was just a wish. Despite the bravado, Egrol knew then that she loved the pod the way one loves a family. Helplessly.

Shreea began sweating in the harness, and her whole body strained as she and her linked ORCA brain composed the herd’s loud song.

Surrounded by the pod, the nebulous edges of the swarm contracted suddenly, transforming from a wispy cumulus threshold to a rigid and tightly vibrating barrier.

Each of the ORCAs emitted a signal into the swarm’s environment. Their false depletion markers momentarily convinced the demobots there was no consumable material left. The signals from the pod formed a tightening circle that slowly compressed the swarm. It began to shrink into its debris field. The signals functioned just like the bubble streams which earthly orcas used to compress and direct schools of fish.

When the swarm was small enough for four ORCAs to contain, the fifth broke off and joined Shreea’s at the far edge of the swarm. Shreea leaned forward, and the two dove.

By now, the debris cloud was far wider than the swarm within it. Egrol watched as Shreea and Cill’s ships spun around the debris cloud and propelled the silt and detritus toward the shrinking swarm boundary.

Both circles slowly shrank as the vessels moved constantly around them, emitting and pulsing in rhythm with each other. They were hunting. Egrol tried not to blink as the pod slowly moved these spheres toward a large asteroid above them. Their coordination was stunning. Like nothing Egrol had ever seen before. Their teamwork, one ship singing while another swam around it, voices harmonizing for a moment, before breaking off and blocking another angle of escape, was balletic. Between Shreea’s parabolic loops toward and away from the swarm, Egrol thought of his last work order, a series of arm movements and directed blinks into cameras that meant absolutely nothing to him, and seethed a little. Why did only the pilots get to control their world like this?

“Don’t get sloppy, Cill,” Shreea’s firm command shook Egrol from his thoughts, and he watched on the display as Cill’s vessel righted itself. Shreea sighed deeply, and Egrol saw worry crawl across her face again.

As the debris field densened, the depletion markers grew less and less effective. The swarm’s edges buckled. Tentacles and wisps of demobots flung out suddenly and retracted.

“Good damn mill,” Shreea’s human language startled Egrol. On the viewport, he saw a huge wave of bots lashing out from the circle.

“I’m not losing a single one of you,” she said. Egrol sensed a hint of remorse in her. Had she lost someone out here?

“Don’t any of you dare break protocol now,” she said, all the softness falling from her. “Let’s start the real fun.”

Shreea moved quickly, without hesitation, and Egrol saw for the first time the ORCAs’ impossible, tacit knowledge of how to move ruthlessly through space, why they bothered with the pairing protocols at all, as they dove into the debris field that still encompassed the swarm.

Shreea’s ship struck the debris field first. The whole thing shook, and Egrol thought she’d sacrificed all three of them, until he looked out the port window with a LiDAR overlay. The debris cloud surrounding the swarm appeared as a hazy orb. The gradient where their ship hit was illuminated. The ship’s nose compressed the cloud, sending a granular cascade inward.

The swarm responded to this by reading the new denseness as novel, destructible material at its center. The same simple broken logic that had sent the swarm spinning out now contracted it, as it poured its resources toward its center. The bright red tendril retracted back into the cloud.

Egrol heard other pilots yelling on the intercom as Shreea’s ship swung back away from the edge and another ship dove into the debris from a new angle. The ships danced and sang and dove. Each percussive collision with the debris field, combined with the ever-tightening depletion signals, drove the debris and the swarm into a tighter and tighter circle. The ships dove and rose and emitted, dove and rose and emitted. Ceaselessly and ruthlessly.

Each time a boundary broke, and the swarm seemed imminently close to destroying a vessel, some other ship made contact with the debris field and sent the swarm contracting again, saving their peer.

Eventually, even Egrol was carried into the rhythm of it, shouting as they rammed the debris sphere, laughing as the escaping bots contracted to follow the dense wave, humming to himself as Shreea emitted more depletion markers.

And impossibly, the once massive swarm was now a neurotically contained sphere. The debris field was dense and just a little wider than the swarm, and mill_swarm784 had been backed up against the long end of an asteroid.

“Let’s eat,” Shreea said. Her voice suddenly so deep it sounded as if it came from the ship itself. It was someone else, he thought. The actual orca. There was no hint of sadness in it any longer.

Three of the ships pushed the debris in until it was entirely coextensive with the swarm.

Shreea dove again.

They crashed into the buzzing swarm with their ship’s side emitting percussive blasts in wide parabolic arcs. Egrol watched as the swarm rippled, then gasped at the series of tight explosions that came as the bots closest to the asteroid were thrown against it.

The violence began in earnest. The pod was a constant swirl of attacks and retreats, each incursion dashing more and more of the swarm against the asteroid surface.

The pattern was practiced, and even Egrol eventually caught up to its rhythm from time to time. The pod circled the swarm, keeping it contained and writhing, then one vessel would break and dash against the swarm, blasting another group of them against the rocks. Egrol was in what the pilots called the carousel. He was more alive than he’d maybe ever been.

Within the broader practiced dance, though, thousands of microdecisions were made nearly instantly. This was the orca’s great contribution to the macroprotocol, a trove of instinctual reactions and tacit knowledge that told them exactly when the swarm was positioned for another barrage without having to think about it, or when to rotate to avoid a single bot spinning just outside parameters.

The swarm receded with each barrage. Egrol began to breathe easier and relax into his viewing chair. It was a beautiful, violent dance. The coordination was beyond impressive. All the bravado that had been so grating to Egrol at first became completely natural. To be this capable. To be this directive. To be this purpose-driven.

Shreea dove again. As the ship sped toward the swarm, a rippling brightness from the LiDAR monitor showing the swarm caught Egrol’s eye. The ripples weren’t concentrating inward; Egrol watched as a massive circle shot out.

The swarm was reversing the impact of the whales. Patterns beget patterns, and even failing systems bend toward existence.

The metal ship groaned and keeled as Shreea and the ORCA tried to slide out of the wave’s way. It was too sudden.

“No!” Shreea shouted a series of commands again, swinging wildly as she did. The burst edge of the swarm swung like a falling skyscraper from the swarm’s center towards them.

Something very loud crashed against the vessel hull, and Shreea grunted, spinning them away.

Shreea’s body shuddered rapidly as the ship evaded wave after wave. Each successive evasion strained Shreea more. She wove in and out of her podmates’ spaces, distracting the long arms that flailed from the swarm-center. Her face grew redder. Her veins engorged. She began grunting and spitting with each movement, but she wanted to save them – she had to save them.

The waves of the swarm carried the debris perimeter outwards with them, like a tide rising with each set. The debris remained even as the swarm ebbed for a moment before expanding farther again.

Soon, the other five vessels were far enough away that they could adjust to the swarm’s ebbs and flows, but Shreea’s ship was caught right at the swarm edge, getting pummeled with each expansion, like those surfers who, coming up for air, are swallowed by a wave the second their head breaks the surface.

Egrol watched helplessly as Shreea’s body contorted again and again, avoiding the worst of the barrage every time, but looking worse and worse with each evasion.

A great wave swept them, and Shreea screamed as her body flipped over itself in the harness, spinning the ship away from a thicket of demobots. A red flashing light immediately flooded the interior. Blood trickled from her nose. A blaring siren shook the air.

Shreea’s limp body slid from the harness and fell, lifeless, onto the floor. The overhead light, still red, began flashing in a line from Egrol to the vacant harness.

He looked briefly at the LiDAR overlay and saw the next wave germinating at the swarm’s center. When the systems of Kupiter deigned to speak to humans, they were very clear. He swallowed hard and crawled from his chair to the harness.

He wasn’t trained. His body was weaker than theirs. He wasn’t some maverick or god. He was Egrol. But if he didn’t do anything, he’d certainly die. Somewhere inside him, he wondered if his jealousy had leaked like a pheromone into the vessel, subtly bending the computational systems of the ORCA toward him and away from Shreea. The pilots’ self-importance was infectious, he thought. He felt guilty, but not guilty enough to die.

He slid his arms and legs into the harness and quickly placed the pairing cap onto his head.

There was nothing autonomous about the pairing protocols. A set of pops, whistles, and croaks sounded, almost like they were bouncing through his skull. Each one conjured an image in his mind: one pop a toothy smile, the next rasp a right hook crashing into a stubbled jaw. The sounds sped up, and so did the images. Everything in his body tensed. Something deep and sonorous began vibrating through him. Each sound scraped like a wolf tone and corresponded to a jittering of his leg, or a twisting of his arm. Every movement felt as uncontrolled as a myoclonic jerk or patellar reflex.

None of this was entirely unfamiliar – synthetic-directed work often took a similar shape – but it was nothing like the bravado and purpose with which Shreea had bragged. He wasn’t in control of any of it. The ORCA’s thoughts passed through his body like an electrical current. They carried an animal fury that scotched. He thought he might die right then, the weight of its commands and instincts felt too large for any one body to manage.

But beneath the ORCA’s insistence, there was something gentler, something familiar. The hard language of computation, the ship itself. Its algorithms, its if/thens ran like cool water over him. It wasn’t just a predator’s wildness, but the ship’s controlled reasoning. The certainty of what to do next filled him like oxygen. His breathing slowed. His heart settled. Suddenly, he was awake within the harness.

He didn’t feel anything as the ship moved once more, but he could open his eyes and watch his body move, directing the ship in turn.

The ORCA’s voice filled Egrol’s throat, and he shouted instructions he didn’t understand into the receiver for the other ORCAs. He understood, his body in total surrender to the ship. The pilots were like everything in Kupiter. He’d been stupid to think there’d be an exception. They were just a substrate. A body. His body moved the ship away from a thin line of demobots that thorned out from the swarm’s edge.

His proprioception and instincts, and the accidents of perception that ever so impossibly attuned a human to the world, were what the ships needed to translate the hunting of the orca into the motion of a spaceship. He commanded a small set of concentrated depletion signals to cut off a rising tentacle from its body so the ship could slip to safety. He was just a biological filament. Shreea had been, too.

What else was new?

Directives flowed through Egrol as the ship dodged the first swarm wave. Already, filaments frayed from the boundary, but, and Egrol was certain this was the orca brain’s intuition, he knew the pod had thinned substantially. They’d destroyed maybe two-thirds of it against the asteroid.

Egrol sent out the retreat signal, and every ORCA stopped emitting depletion markers. The swarm immediately spread further out, thinning even more in response. Egrol waited, some instinct commanding him to hold his breath until the swarm was just thin enough to …

“DIVE!” The command came from the same part of his belly where fear gnawed.

Immediately, the six ships dove into the demobots, cutting the swarm into six subswarms. Their numbers had decreased so dramatically, and they’d spread out so far that the bots could no longer sense each other across the entire swarm length.

It lost coherence between the ORCAs’ mad dashings. Each ORCA now circled a microswarm, and each in turn destroyed its prey with a series of physical attacks, bouncing them onto nearby asteroids until all of them were destroyed. There was a fervor, a bloodlust that reddened then darkened his vision entirely.

Egrol lost consciousness somewhere between segmenting his microswarm and the total dissolution of the threat. He came to in a hangar bay with the sad faces of the other pilots turned away from him.

Cill touched his shoulder.

“It was a good hunt,” he said.

“And a sad drowning,” the group answered. No one was looking at each other, or him. Shreea’s body was covered in a white sheet by the hangar exit.

“Swim with your freedom,” Cill said.

Another pilot got up, wheeled her into the exit chamber, and closed the door.

“Die for your pod,” they said in unison. The doors opened and Shreea fell into space.

“Did you know?” Cill said, turning to Egrol. “There was once an Earth orca who swam 1,000 miles with the corpse of her daughter. Seventeen straight days without pausing for rest or food. The body would sink, and she’d dive and bring it back to the surface and keep swimming.”

Shreea’s body vanished into the black.

Egrol lay there looking up at the hangar ceiling, breathing heavily. Despite the total lack of autonomy, his whole body felt alive and vibrant in a way it never had before. He wanted to be sad. He knew better than most what death meant, how it rioted through those that were left behind to hold it. But there was a stronger feeling now, an embodied joy he couldn’t escape.

He could see the pilots’ confidence in a new light. How sensible it was. How run after run would slowly convince you that you were somehow actually in charge. He hadn’t directed anything, but the actions that flowed through his body, his completely embodied experience … He felt like he had been a part of something, that he had done something, maybe for the first time in his life.

It wasn’t true. But it felt true.

A headache was slowly blooming on his right temple, probably some injury and concussion he’d have to attend to. Despite it all, he was giddy, happy, buzzy. He hadn’t done a thing, hadn’t made a single real decision, but his body didn’t care. It was happy. It was electric. It was alive. It was the first time he’d ever felt good after a session of directed action. A sharp pain from his right side – probably a broken rib – interrupted his thoughts. Still, even in pain, he felt good. When he didn’t hurt so much, he’d figure out why.